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This humanoid robot is playing ping pong better than most amateur players I’ve seen
11 September 2025
It’s even balancing like a human. When do we move into uncanny valley?
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HITTER: A HumanoId Table TEnnis Robot via Hierarchical Planning and Learning – YouTube
I tend to approach robot videos with a mild air of defeat and scepticism, in no small part because a lot of hype has been generated over what has turned out to be just choreographed movements in the past. Not here, though. This little HITTER (HumanoId Table TEnnis Robot) is hitting bona fide table tennis rallies against humans. And yes, that’s table tennis, not ping pong; I’m right, you’re wrong.
Alright, alright, we’ll go with ‘ping pong’. HITTER, the ping pong-playing robot, comes from researchers at the FHL Vive Center for Enhanced Reality at UC Berkeley. In a recent video (via Techeblog), it’s shown forehanding, backhanding, and smashing ping pong balls with impressive dexterity and, dare I say it, human-like movement.
What’s so visually impressive about it, at least to my eyes, is how it keeps balance and makes quick decisions and very human-like arm and leg movements. In particular, as someone who used to play a lot of table tennis and who wasn’t awful at it, I was genuinely impressed by how HITTER returns smashes, and also with the return at 0:28 right off the edge of the table.
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The robot achieves all this thanks to its design which “employs a hierarchical decomposition that separates high-level trajectory planning from low-level whole-body control execution.” In other words, there’s one part of its ‘brain’ that takes camera input and predicts where the ball will land and how to return the shot, then there’s a second part that translates this higher-order analysis into actual ‘body’ movement.
Reinforcement learning—the fancy AI industry term for trial and error—was used to train it, including looking at videos of “human motion references” to improve its movements. The result, as you can see, is a robot that can adjust to different shots on the fly and return the shots very naturally for some long rallies.
(Image credit: Hybrid Robotics @ YouTube, FHL Vive Center for Enhanced Reality, UC Berkeley)
HITTER “achieved 106 consecutive shots in a rally against a human opponent, surpassing typical casual play duration and demonstrating consistent tracking, returning, and balance recovery capabilities.”
Very cool stuff. Though I’d be remiss if I didn’t end with an obligatory ‘it’s a robot’ reminder. I’m saying this as much as a reminder to myself as to anyone else: We need to remember not to attribute our awe and praise to the robot, but instead to the engineers who have managed to create a piece of technology that can adapt to changing environments so naturally. That would be the case whether it was a humanoid robot or a giant slab of metal being swung around by a cable.
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HITTER also serves as a reminder that robotics seems to be heading in a very humanoid, or at least animal-oid (did you see those Chinese robo-wolves?) direction. It really is hard to beat nature’s—or God’s—designs in many areas.
Plus, I doubt humans would feel as comfortable playing ping pong against a generic mass of fast-moving and distinctly non-humanoid metal as they would playing against little HITTER.
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Hardware Writer
Jacob got his hands on a gaming PC for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He swiftly realised the local PC repair store had ripped him off with his build and vowed never to let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Jacob the hardware junkie was born. Since then, Jacob’s led a double-life as part-hardware geek, part-philosophy nerd, first working as a Hardware Writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working towards a PhD in Philosophy for a few years while freelancing on the side for sites such as TechRadar, Pocket-lint, and yours truly, PC Gamer. Eventually, he gave up the ruthless mercenary life to join the world’s #1 PC Gaming site full-time. It’s definitely not an ego thing, he assures us.
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If you were ever worried about a machine uprising, check out the World Humanoid Robot Games and have a giggle with me
The first autonomous robot football match happened in China and it’s like watching drunk toddlers with fewer ethical setbacks
I am now slightly obsessed with Uncle Bot, a Chinese robot in people clothes that’s rapidly becoming a social media sensation
You can buy a Chinese made programmable humanoid-robot for under $6,000 USD, but it might be the same one that tried to fight civilians
‘It has to be 100 percent safe because I cannot escape it’: Study finds people are unsurprisingly creeped out by humanoid robots despite the industry’s obsession
This undetectable AI-powered aimbot physically moves the mouse pad to cheat in Valorant, an invention so unholy I demand it be cast down to the depths of hell where it belongs
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